WCS 2014 - Hybrid System Possible? - Page 7

On August 24 2013 05:07 mvdunecats wrote:
How many aspiring professional SC2 players from NA have retired from SC2 in order to play LoL or DotA2? I can really only think of Destiny, but he's more of an outlier in that he is more of an entertainer than a competitor.

If SC2 players from NA feel that they don't have a shot at making a living with SC2 and turn to things outside of eSports, then no format change to WCS NA can overcome that, because it's a more general problem with eSports in NA.

On August 28 2013 11:02 Op wrote:
Just a weird question: why do we have 3 different WCS tournaments (KR, EU, NA) ?

If we all would want to see the best games, then why not have one big tournament in Korea (like GSL before) ? Or have all 3 tournaments in Korea so the best players can participate and qualify for the finals ?

BTW: love the discussions, some very interesting points, especially having 'x' spots for non-resident players, and the team-based region seem quite interesting

On August 24 2013 20:40 FetusThrower wrote:
Region lock doesn't work because..
-Doesn't allow growth within weaker scenes
-Doesn't allow talent from other countries to come out (i.e. korean scene suffocation)
-Causes crazily imba season finals (practically walkovers)

On August 22 2013 17:14 ChosenSC2 wrote:
Anything that promotes actually having a NA scene, I'm all for it. As someone who has eat, breathe, sleep SC for like 6 years, it's hard to even care anymore. I don't want to tune in to WCS "America" to watch 32 Koreans go at it.... wtf?

Or go to MLG in America to see 85 Koreans get the top 75 spots. I would actually love to watch MLG if the final 4 was like Sheth, ViBE, HuK, SeleCt way more than watching Korean mercenaries who just fly in for 2 days to win money. They have GSL, and if an American wants to play in GSL they can't just fly there for 2 days and win $25,0000....

The best example I can think of is like in Canada, they have a Canadian Football League. It is very possible for a player, coach, manager, employee, organization etc to make a sustainable and comfortable income being a part of it. If in the Canadian Football League every season they just had the Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers come SHIT on everyone and take any money associated with the league do you think it would survive as a League?

TL:DR: Until NA players have a reason to be full-time, something to play for, the NA scene will slowly die. Right now there is no reason unless you make money from streaming or other means.

On September 04 2013 11:04 rd wrote:


Koreans flying out to foreign events and stomping foreigners doesn't make foreigners better. They need practice with Koreans, not a couple bo3's before getting rolled. It can offer an incentive to Koreans to move to foreign countries to compete and play on the region's server and practice with their players, which does fuel growth.

On August 28 2013 11:18 Op wrote:
People who preferred the GSL model or want to watch the best games, would probably be best off by watching the Korean WCS. The only problem is that a lot of the best players (like Taeja, Hero, etc) are playing in WCS NA now.
The solution would be to have these players play in the Korean WCS as well. We could encourage this by increasing the prize pool for WCS Korea: the prize money of what-used-to-be-GSL + whatever Blizzard adds to the current WCS Korea prize money.

WCS EU and NA could then be (partially) region-locked, with maybe less high-level play but interesting story lines, local players to cheer for, and providing the necessary money for the local scenes to develop themselves. Korean players who would want to participate in EU or NA would have to live there or there could be a requirement on the number of ladder games played on the local server, a limited-spots qualifier or something like this (goal here is to have them practice in the region, so they help local players improve). People who would only want to watch the best games with the best players, would then avoid EU and NA and only watch the WCS KR (and the finals).

The WCS finals could then have representation based on the results of the previous finals, so for example 10 spots for players from WCS Korean, 3 from EU and 3 from NA. This might also encourage Korean players to play in WCS Korea because there are more spots for the finals.When players from for example NA would do better during the finals, then they would earn additional spots for the next finals.

In summary, a combination of many things already proposed by others in previous posts.

On September 04 2013 09:08 Sherlock117 wrote:
...

I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point.
...

Point scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis.

On September 04 2013 09:08 Sherlock117 wrote:
First of all, sorry for the long post. I've been thinking long and hard about how the system works and have some thoughts that I want to explain. But to really explain things requires some words!

I think the WCS is pretty good actually, but with a few tweaks a lot more can be accomplished. One problem with WCS I've heard Xenocider mention is that right now there are basically 3 opportunities in a year for up-and-comers to make a name for themselves in the WCS qualifiers. Is it worth it for an up-and-comer to devote 30+ hours a week for a very small chance to qualify and maybe win $100 once every couple months?

Some of the biggest problem with the current WCS system I see are:
1. Suffocation by Korean pros
2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name
3. Prize money not properly scaling
4. WCS points not properly scaling

I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point.

So now I would like to explain what I mean by each of these problems and propose some solutions. Maybe these aren't perfect solutions, but I hope you think about them and maybe tweak them a little bit yourself to make them even better.

1. Suffocation by Korean pros

This one is pretty obvious. WCS America is just another region for Koreans to compete, albeit mostly Koreans who are popular in the American scene. How can we get people to be interested in watching WCS America? What would make people want to tune in?

Personally, I find myself making sure to tune in when it is one of my favorite players playing an important match, and my favorite players are either popular Koreans or Europeans who play my race Terran (so Polt, Taeja, Lucifron, Happy) or almost ANY American player (Scarlett, ViBe, HuK, etc.). In the WCS Season 2 Global Finals the player I cared about most was Scarlett, followed by Polt and Naniwa. I did whatever I could to make sure I would be able to watch the Scarlett vs Bomber quarterfinal. This match was an very important (and competitive) match involving a player I cared about.

So to summarize, an all-korean WCS America is boring, and a region locked WCS America would be lame to watch. Let's make it something we want to watch! How do we do this?

2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name

Again, as it stands right now, the motivation for an up-and-comer to devote 30 hours a week for several months of intensive training is to try his hand at the WCS qualifiers 3 times a year and maybe, maaaaaaaybe get a spot in premier league. This is the problem people have been talking about in this thread and some people aren't understanding. Yes, the American players just aren't as good as Koreans in general, but the main issue is there is little motivation for Americans to become good right now. In order to increase motivation there needs to be a good scaling of goals (different levels of prize money) which are obtainable for local up-and-comers at the lower levels.

3. Prize money not properly scaling

The way I see WCS currently, if you qualify for WCS challenger league, great! That's a step in the right direction. But you win absolutely no money unless you qualify for premier league. If you do, you either get $100, $200, or $300 depending on which slot you qualified through (bracket stage, group stage 1st place, or group stage 2nd place). But wait, if you do qualify, you get an additional $1500 next season by playing in premier league. So as a challenger league player you should actually look at it as I either make nada, nothing, zilch, or I make $1600-$1800. In my opinion, that gap is the biggest single issue with WCS not creating opportunities for the up and coming players.

Then, there is no difference between 25-32 and 17-24 in premier league and only a very small difference between that and 9-16.

4. Points not properly scaling

The issue is exactly the same as the issue above. Non-qualifying players get 25 points, qualifying players get either 150 or 200. That's too big a gap and the 25 points are basically worthless. But there is another, more important issue with ranking points. At this point, the rankings are essentially only worhwhile to people trying to qualify for the year end finals. I'm fine with that for now, though it is something to improve in the future.

Blizzard wanted to make sure to not completely stifle other tournaments and throw out some points for other tournaments satisfying certain requirements. But the way I see it, the only qualifyers for the year end finals (the only thing the rankings are good for right now) will be those who made it to season finals at least twice, or placed in the top 2 at one of the season finals. Essentially nothing else matters. So instead of rewarding consistent performance and determining who the best player is, the rankings reward the players who perform well over a 3 day period.

A few examples:

A consistent player who finishes 9th-16th in a couple WCS seasons and maybe just couldn't push through in a 3rd season and finishes 6th place, while winning several non-WCS tournaments (maybe an IEM and an MLG) should be considered a possible candidate for being in the top 16 players in the world. This person would have something like 2600 points and probably finish the year ranked 25-30.

A player who does absolutely nothing in non-WCS tournaments, only qualifies for one WCS season, scrapes by in 5th place, and then somehow miraculously wins the global finals ends up with 3500 points and something like 10th-15th. The biggest issue to me is that finishing 6th in a season gets you 500 points, while finishing 5th gets you 1000 points, and finishing 4th gets you 1250 points. That's just a wonky point scale and needs to be tweaked.

Or somebody like Naniwa has some really solid results in WCS and out and is in the running for the year-end-finals, but then has one bad day by dropping to challenger league in the round of 32 and now has 0 chance of making it. Why? His only hope at this point would be to win at least 1 Tier I non-WCS tournament and one or two Tier II tournaments.

Solutions?

I said I would come at this with a view of how tennis works, because I think Starcraft would succeed very much if they tweaked some things in the way they are done with tennis.

4. Point scaling

Point scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis.

Possibly reduce the WCS seasons so the winner gets 1000 and so on appropriately as these tournaments are more money winners for the players and exclusive qualifiers for season finals. Right now there is too much double-dipping of points each season within WCS tournaments making non-WCS tournaments irrelevant.

Tier II tournaments could be either 750 or 1000 depending on prize money, again with more spots getting points lower down. A new Tier III tournament tier could be added awarding somewhere between 200-500 points to the winner depending on prize money. These could be region locked tournaments.

3. Money scaling

Another easy fix without the answer being "More money!". Change the money for premier league to:

25-32: $750
17-24: $1250
13-16: $1750
9-12: $2500

This makes each win in Premier league worthwhile. What else does it do? It frees up an additional $9000 in the prize money that can be used elsewhere! Where? In challenger league and it's qualifiers. This actually doesn't make the 17-32 finishers lose out as much as you think because they will won some more money down in challenger league. It just spreads more money to challenger league players.

Changes for the challenger league? Have the bracket stage be about winning the money, have the group stage be about qualifying for premier league or challenger league next season. Bracket winners get $500, runners-up get $300, 3rd place gets $200, and first round losers $100. That only eats up $4800 of the extra money and everyone who qualifies gets paid!

What about the rest of the money? Hold off a minute and I'll give you my thought.

2. More opportunities for up-and-comers

Increase the number of qualifiers and drop outs each season of wcs to 24 instead of 8, adding an additional round to the bracket stage of challenger league with the winners getting $0 (or maybe $50?).

Have qualifiers spread throughout the WCS season, once every few weeks. Some are open to anybody and offer no prize money, only challenger league qualification. Some are region locked and offer some of that $4000 leftover prize money as well as challenger league qualification.

Oh, wait! That also solves some of #1, suffocation by Korean pros, while at the same time not region locking!!!!

I'm a numbers guy, so I could go into more detail about how the wcs system should work and give exact numbers and all that, but that's not necessary. Try and get the big idea

So please consider this, and maybe offer some tweaks that would make it even better!

On September 04 2013 13:09 vthree wrote:


Although I agree with the many of these points. I just want to point out the issue with points scaling (more points for non-WCS events). Unlike tennis where most of the top 50 pros can attend most of the tournaments. This is not the case for non-WCS events like MLG, Dreamhack, etc. Sure, some tournaments have qualifiers. But it still doesn't take away the fact that the EG, TL, players (and HyuN) just gets a lot more opportunity to attend foreign events.

On September 04 2013 12:45 Kaitlin wrote:


What a warped community. Tournaments are about the best game play. What kind of a joke organization would go out of its way to deliberately drop the quality of game play comprising two-thirds of its product ? If people want to watch their favorites play sub-optimally, they can watch their streams and subscribe to support them.